Archive for July, 2007

For the sake of the upcoming East Coast Fantasy Fiction Tour, my WordPress blog has found its home on the Official www.christopherhopper.com website as the new splash page. You can still access the old website through the “enter full CH site” link, or just by going to christopherhopper.org

As part of the Fantasy Fiction Tour pre kick-off, I’ll be running a four part interview this week with John Copper, CEO of Real Armor of God (.com). John’s generosity is immense, as well as his heart for the Lord. He has graciously donated four beautiful swords to the four author’s, as well as hand crafted, hand painted shields with the tour logo on them. [Wayne, Bryan, Sharon and I beam gratuitously]. You’ll get a chance to see the pieces as we’ll be arriving at each stop with them. Please check out his website, and leave your comments on this post for all to read.

CH

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CH: What propelled you to want to sell swords as an occupation? Seems like every boy’s dream!

JC: [Laugh] Yes, you would think so – and I know more about swords than I ever really intended. Actually, I never thought in a million years I would be doing this. My background is in sales and marketing for wholesale distribution of computers and supplies. I was given a sword by my father-in-law as a thank you gift. Of course, my wife did not want it in the house… so we agreed to have it framed and put a scripture verse plate under the sword (Hebrews 4:12). It looks great and has been an interesting conversation piece in our house over the years. With new friends and people we are not sure of their faith, we conclude our sword explanation by turning the conversation to Jesus and a gentle witnessing conversation.

A few years later, we were given a medieval knight figurine which had all the pieces of the armor of God. I told my wife how much I had always wanted something like is and how awesome I thought it was. Next thing I know I was telling her, “I bet there are a lot of other Christian men who would like these too.”

We started the business on $500 and two products we manufactured, a sword frame with any scripture and a medieval knight figure with a paraphrase of Eph 6:13-19. Of course, I needed to find a few swords to offer people. Since the knight figure was all about the armor of God and we were selling “real” swords, we decided to call the company Real Armor of God.com (http://www.realarmorofgod.com).

The sword market is heavily saturated and very competitive. I laugh when I look back at our humble beginnings. We had about 15 different swords we offered at first and averaged about 450 hits a month on the website. God has blessed us and we now have about 700 items we sell in 155 categories with about 5 million hits a month (400,000 pages read a month for those interested in the details).

We also have a great deal of education and historical information on the site for people to learn from. Christians really like our Knighting Ceremony information and use it for Raising A Modern Day Night graduations. (Of course they also get a nice sword and or a custom painted shield for their son too.)

The Fantasy Fiction Tour continues to get some cool press. First Publisher’s Weekly ran a story on it, and now the Associated Press ran a segment of my little trailer on their weekly religious video piece. Click HEREto read and watch.

Jennifer and I are just one week away from flying out to Atlanta, GA for the International Christian Retail Show where we’ll meet up with Wayne, Sharon and Bryan for the groundbreaking Fantasy Fiction Tour. We’re so excited to be hitting the road with these wonderful authors and to meet new people.

Each day of the tour I’ll be posting a Road Journal right here on my blog. Jennifer and I will be adding pics and letting you know how things are going. We’ll also be contributing for the daily video re-cap which will be posted with the general update on the Tour website, so please make sure to bookmark it. The other authors will also be posting their own news on their blogs:

We’ll also be running a special costume contest during the tour, so if you’re planning on coming out to see us, check out the details on the FFT site at: http://www.fantasyfictiontour.com

A big “Thank You” to all those that attended the 2007 Free Methodist Church Bible Quiz Finals at Roberts Wesleyan College this past week. We had an absolute blast with you Friday night! We’ll be posting pics of the concert shortly.